1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to story telling games and apparatus and devices useful for playing the games. More specifically, the invention relates to a game and game apparatus for stimulating imagination and creativity in a plurality of players or teams of players by story telling.
2. Description of the Related Art
The use of an image to stimulate ideas, creativity and story telling, as well as verbal skills is known. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 1,379,871 issued May 31, 1921 to McGuire, depicts a set of cards where each card depicts a scene and object or descriptive matter to be used as a game or puzzle. The object of the game is to arrange all the cards in the proper order to tell a story. No story is actually told by any players, rather, the story is known ahead of time and the game play is accomplished by players equally distributing all the cards and then, on each successive turn, arranging cards based on the known story.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,891,209 issued Jun. 24, 1975 to Kritzberg, a game is disclosed that comprises sets of cards wherein each card is provided with a series of related words. A card is randomly selected by a player on their turn and the player must make up a story about or using one of the words on the card. The player receives two gold stars for completing a story and the winner of the game is the player with the most gold stars. In this game, however, no graphic or pictorial images are used and no grading, score or criteria are used in telling the story.
A branching storyline game has frequently been described, for example, in US Patent application No. 2006/0040748 published Feb. 23, 2006 by Barthold. Here, a storytelling game is disclosed where the goal of the game is to work through a story to a successful ending by choosing among possible story directions at story branch points. The game can include electronic card readers and multiple story cards. While cards and a story are involved there are no photo cards or story telling by the players and the game involves one story where multiple players are involved in the one story.
A story telling game involving pictures is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,684,135 issued Aug. 4, 1987 to Bouchal. In this game, each player is provided with a game card which is imprinted with pictorial illustrations and legends characterizing a predetermined number of different kinds of stories, which each player is to tell during the course of play. The players determine, randomly, the characteristics of the story to be told and win by completing stories using the entire card.
The previous games though do not provide for constructing stories where the story has specific beginning, middle and end nor where the story is scored based on the quality of the story. Further, there are no games which utilized photo cards and where the story is based totally on the players' creativity in interpreting the content of the photo.